Secularists lobby Welsh Govt to ‘protect children from Christian teaching’

The National Secular Society has urged the Welsh Government to consider stopping faith schools teaching the “tenets of their faith”.

Responding to an Education Committee consultation on the implementation of school reforms, the campaign group called for an end to “confessional” teaching on Religion, Values and Ethics (RVE) and for “laws requiring daily acts of collective worship” to be repealed.

Across Wales, there are over 140 Church in Wales and 79 Roman Catholic schools.

‘End and prohibit’

The NSS recommended the Committee “explore options” for ending the allowance for faith schools to teach Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) “according to the tenets of their faith”.

It claimed that the “promotion of religious belief throughout RSE leads to the teaching of stigmatising and discriminatory attitudes about LGBT people, contraceptives and abortion”.

Secularists also dismissed “the legal requirement on all schools in Wales to hold a daily act of collective worship that is ‘broadly Christian’ in character” as “a poor use of a school’s time”.

The group has written to the Welsh Government calling for an “explicit prohibition” on teaching what the Bible says about creation, although the main Welsh exam board assesses students on their knowledge of this in GCSE Religious Studies.

Christian assemblies

In September, during the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill’s House of Lords Committee Stage, Peers debated amendments to scrap Christian assemblies in non-faith schools in England and require Religious Education to teach about “non-religious beliefs” such as humanism.

Lord Weir of Ballyholme noted that the amendment to ditch Christian assemblies “almost replaces a religious assembly with what is, in effect, a humanist assembly”.

He also warned that the RE amendments risk “the non-religious belief side overwhelming the religious side of RE” and diluting it to an “unacceptable extent”.

Currently, state-funded schools in England and Wales must conduct acts of collective worship that are “wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character”. In England, RE must be “in the main Christian”. In both cases, parents have the right of withdrawal.